I haven't done one of these long construction-update posts in almost nine years... and you know, I didn't expect to be doing one again at all, because I never expected us to be closed for enough consecutive days for it to happen. (Awesome.)

Well, repairs are in full swing this month. There is a great deal of cutting of wood going on here, and a constant haze of plywood dust. It's just like old times.

And patching. So much patching. Look at the edges of that worn spot in the photo below. That's really a lot of layers of paint. Too many to sand off, so instead we're spackling, spackling, and then spackling some more, before re-painting the floors again. Normally we have to re-paint the main dance floor about every six weeks. Hopefully after this, it will last a bit longer.

It turns out that a more "real" repair job, e.g., tearing up the top layer of plywood and replacing it, would been so much more expensive that it's cheaper to just re-paint constantly.

I'm not entirely clear on what this dingus to the right is, but it's kind of cool. I suspect it's a left-over piece from the unused fourth station at the main bar, which we have just replaced with a cabinet.

Originally, way back when, we had planned on being able to have four bartenders at the main bar, but then after the bar had been built, we realized that for soundproofing reasons, we had to build a sound-dampening wall in front of the south door, which means that the main stairs had to turn instead of going straight down toward the door. That made the rightmost bar station basically unusable: anyone trying to stand there for service would be blocking the exit.

(Looking back, I see that I haven't really told the full story of the world of shit we nearly found ourselves in when we had to turn those stairs. Oh, man. We very nearly had to tear part of the balcony down and start over. It was a disaster, that was nearly an apocalyptically epic disaster. But it's a long story. Some other time.)

So anyway, that sink has been full of haphazardly-stored plastic cups ever since. Finally we've re-claimed that space with real shelves.

Check it out, it's a CØDE flyer! This is underneath one of the benches in the corner of the balcony. We're having some of the benches re-upholstered, which means that we've looked underneath them for the first time since... some time before 2002, I guess.

Did you know that 75% of household dust is human skin, and most of the rest is human hair and dust-mite poop?

Pretty sweet, huh? You're welcome.

Long ago, someone had punched a big hole into this wall in the lounge, and we hid that with the time-honored technique of hanging posters over the hole. Finally it is fixed. It hasn't been painted yet, but I think the minions did a great job of matching the texture!

Since we first opened, my standing instruction has been, "When you patch a hole in drywall, do so by replacing it with plywood." The next time someone punches this wall, they will remember it.

The green room (the smaller room to the right of the lounge) is looking pretty respectable right now. It's all patched, painted and basically done, making it the only place in the club that isn't currently coated in construction detritus. Devon says that this is his "happy place."

That's him being happy.

To the right is pictured the spot at the bottom of the backstage stairs where normally the ladders and dumpster live. Or, more accurately, lurk.

Just beyond these windows, you can see that same brick wall that is visible through the windows in the lounge. That wall is part of the Department of Human Services building around the corner. We think that our back windows were bricked over in 1953.

I suspect that these particular windows have been broken since 1985.

The hidden nooks and crannies of this place are just spilling over with character, let me tell you. Character in great, heaping fistfuls.

What are you are seeing in this photo is one of our new wifi routers. We used to have just one wifi access point, but I picked up a set of used Cisco Aironet 1230B access points on eBay for like $15 each, so now we have five of them spread around the club. We put them pretty much where the old kiosk stations had been, which seems strangely appropriate.

It turns out that a single access point (of any vintage) can only really handle 20 to 25 connections; it's a frequency/bandwidth thing, not a CPU thing. More connections than that, and you get too many IP packet collisions, and nobody gets anywhere. So really what you want is a bunch of access points with small range, rather than one access point with long range. So these all have their power cranked down enough that their cells just slightly overlap with each other. They all have the same SSID and bridge to the kiosk network, so your phone or laptop should be able to lock on to the closest one as you move around the building. That's the theory, anyway.

I'm curious about the WiFi routers. In my experience, moving from one router to another often causes hang-ups; that is, if you move (or the signal changes) while loading a web page then the browser will just hang there; but if you refresh the page, it loads quickly. I've always assumed that some buried layer — the browser, the TCP-IP protocol, something — something couldn't manage the handoff, and the packets were being sent to the old base station. It happens when I'm walking around.

Am I wrong that this is an issue? Obviously, you aren't providing a crucial service, much less charging for it; also, the just-stand-still workaround is more than sufficient for googling the answer to bar trivia.

Assuming there's no mesh system involved you might get a slight blip while transitioning between AP's. The AP's are not routers, they are bridge devices, so the transition really depends on how quickly the underlying switch decides to recognize that the mac address of the wireless card has moved. Either way, MOAR INTERWEBZ

Good point about the router/AP distinction. Theoretically, I knew that.

So, In practice, do applications like web browsers handle that hiccup gracefully, i.e., when the router is still sending packets to AP #1, but the client is connecting throught AP#2? Does it know that it stopped getting data, re-request some of it, and in doing so tell the router that its routing has changed?

This is why I said I don't know much about TCP-IP. I suppose that it means I don't know much about http, either. I forgot that layer.

The browser is unaware of such things, all things related to wireless are handled in the operating system. That being said, how well your OS handles that disconnect-connect experience depends on how good it is :)

another method you may try for better wifi access: limit the data rates that are acceptable to your AP. By limiting connections to only the higher rates, you should switch to a better access point. This allows you keep the power up and and still cover some of the corners that get missed when you turn the power down. It also make sure you stay at the higher data rate instead of dropping down to a 1Mbps connection.

speaking of cisco gear, I have a load of old 350b's that I need to get rid of if you need some more coverage.